Michael Cohen linked to AT&T, Novartis Payments

Drug giant Novartis revealed Wednesday that it paid President Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen $1.2 million for health-care policy consulting work that he proved “unable” to do. The company also said it has been questioned by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team about the payments to Cohen.

NBC News reported later Wednesday that a senior Novartis official said that Cohen reached out shortly after Trump’s election “promising access” to the new administration.

Novartis said it signed a one-year contract with Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, for $100,000 per month in February 2017, shortly after Trump was inaugurated as president. Novartis said it believed Cohen “could advise the company as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. health-care policy matters, including the Affordable Care Act.”

But just a month after signing the deal, Novartis executives had their first meeting with Cohen, and afterward “determined that Michael Cohen and Essentials Consultants would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated.”

The payments (to AT&T) were revealed in a document published by Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti Tuesday afternoon.

Avenatti alleged that Essential Consultants, a shell company set up by Cohen before the election to pay Daniels, was paid by several corporations, including AT&T. At the time, AT&T was seeking government approval for its acquisition of Time Warner, CNN’s parent company.

A document released by Avenatti stated that “Essential received $200,000 in four separate payments of $50,000 in late 2017 and early 2018 from AT&T.”

AT&T disputed this timeline.

“Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration,” AT&T said Tuesday evening. “They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”

AT&T’s assertion, in essence, is that Cohen provided information about what made Trump tick. Selling access to or influence with a president is not illegal, but it has the whiff of the so-called “swamp” that Trump rails against.

AT&T declined to comment on the total amount of the payments. But a source with knowledge of the matter said the total was actually higher than the $200,000 listed by Avenatti.

AT&T, one of the biggest companies in the country, has numerous issues before the government, including valuable government contracts and changes to so-called “net neutrality” regulations.

But the timing of payments to a Trump lawyer is especially significant because of the AT&T-Time Warner deal. Trump, then the GOP nominee for president, expressed opposition to the $85 billion deal on the day it was announced.

And just how did Avenatti, the seemingly omni-present lawyer representing Stormy Daniels get such records to release?

The Treasury Department’s inspector general is investigating whether confidential banking information related to a company controlled by President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen may have been leaked, a spokesman said.

Rich Delmar, counsel to the inspector general, said that in response to media reports the office is “inquiring into allegations” that Suspicious Activity Reports on Cohen’s banking transactions were “improperly disseminated.”

Detailed claims about Cohen’s banking history were made public Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, an attorney for Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star who was paid $130,000 by Cohen shortly before the 2016 election to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump.

On Twitter, Avenatti circulated a dossier that purports to show that Cohen was hired last year by the U.S.-based affiliate of a Russian company owned by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian business magnate who attended Trump’s inauguration and was recently subjected to sanctions by the U.S. government. The affiliate, New York investment firm Columbus Nova, confirmed the payment, saying it was for consulting on investments and other matters, but denied any involvement by Vekselberg.

Avenatti’s dossier also alleged that, after Trump’s inauguration, Cohen’s company Essential Consultants had received payments from several others with business considerations before the federal government, including telecommunications giant AT&T, aircraft manufacturer Korea Aerospace Industries and pharmaceutical company Novartis. All three companies subsequently confirmed the payments.

In an interview, Avenatti declined to reveal the source of his information.

“The source or sources of our information is our work product, and nobody’s business,” Avenatti said. “They can investigate all they want, but what they should be doing is releasing to the American public the three Suspicious Activity Reports filed on Michael Cohen’s account. Why are they hiding this information?”

A fixture on cable television, Avenatti has been calling on the Treasury Department for weeks to release reports of unusual banking transactions by Cohen. He came up with a social media hashtag: #releasetheSAR, using the acronym for a Suspicious Activity Report.

Michael Avenatti, porn star Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, released a seven-page dossier on Tuesday containing a list of payments purportedly made to Michael Cohen, the lawyer for President Donald Trump.

But there is one problem with the document: two of the allegedly “fraudulent” payments were made to men named Michael Cohen who have no affiliation with Trump. Avenatti’s report includes a section listing “possible fraudulent and illegal financial transactions” involving Trump’s lawyer. One of the payments is a $4,250 wire transfer from a Malaysian company, Actuarial Partners, to a bank in Toronto.

Zainal Kassim, a representative for Actuarial Partners, told The Daily Caller News Foundation Avenatti’s report is a case of mistaken identity. He forwarded an email the falsely accused Michael Cohen sent to Avenatti requesting the lawyer “correct this error forthwith and make it known publicly” there is no connection to Trump’s Michael Cohen.

“You are surely aware of the fact that this is an extremely common name and would request that you take care before involving innocent parries in this sordid affair,” wrote Cohen, who told Avenatti he is an international consultant who was paid by Actuarial Partners for work on a project in Tanzania.

“Actuarial Partners have already received inquiries from the press in this regard, and we would like to see this scurrilous rumour spiked as soon as possible.” Haaretz, the Israeli news outlet, found another case of mistaken identity in Avenatti’s report.“Mr. Cohen received one wire transfer in the amount of $980.00 from a Kenyan bank from account holders Netanel Cohen and Stav Hayun to an account in Israel at Bank Hapoalim,” Avenatti wrote. Haaretz caught up with Netanel Cohen, who acknowledged having a bank account in Kenya and transferring money to a Michael Cohen. But the Michael Cohen in questions is his brother, Netanel told the news outlet. And his brother is not Trump’s lawyer.

“I’ve never heard of Michael Cohen, and I have no connection to this affair,” Netanel told Haaretz. It is unclear how Avenatti obtained the financial records cited in his report. But various news outlets, including The New York Times, also appear to have viewed the documents. The Treasury Department’s office of the inspector general opened an investigation into whether someone leaked Cohen’s financial documents to Avenatti and the press, it was reported on Wednesday.

The Michael Cohen saga, and the headache it will be causing President Trump and Avenatti both, appears to just be starting.

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Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire.

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19 Responses

When the history of this mega corruption is written it will most definitely not be called The Smartest Guys in the Room. Something more like “Wait? These guys can’t be this bad at this. Can they?”Report

There is a theme going here with these Trump associates. If you read into the material, after one meeting the company pretty much determined that Cohen was full of it. Its why the more I think and read on the Russia stuff, its going to come down to the Cohens, Roger Stones, and Flynns of the world being deemed by the Russians as not worthy of running real intelligence ops with despite what they originally thought, so they settled for the chaos instead. Then the cover-up stuff is just self inflicted stupidity. Possible more incompetence than master plan.Report

Manafort is the only one who seems like he was smart enough to get stuff done. It would not surprise me at all if the rest were just too dense for long term use and cooperation.

Novartis did find Cohen to be useless after one meeting. That is impressive. Cohen must really be a bag of hammers and/or just loudly corrupt. Either way being that bad at influence peddling/ being bribed does make it a bit juicy for the payers to spill the beans. Sure ATT and Novartis look bad but they are also laying it out quickly about Cohen with all the obvious implications.Report

Manafort is separate to my mind, and without blowing up the comments section too much with info lets just stipulate that unlike Cohen and Stone and maybe some others, there is no questions about his association with Russia due to his known activities in the Ukraine. Whatever crimes they get Manafort on, he knew what he was doing, and did so over a long period of time and on a high level. Though forgotten now there was quite the outcry of “what are you doing” when Trump brought him in, only to quickly relieve him. Then there is Flynn, who of all people the Obama people specifically warned the Trump transition team not to let him back into the WH after Obama had fired him. That alone should tell people something.Report

If you read into the material, after one meeting the company pretty much determined that Cohen was full of it

Well how many meetings do you need for a bribe? You notice they decided just to pay out, right?

Now maybe they had the misfortune to have lawyers even worse than Cohen, and thus didn’t write their contracts with any way out in case of “Total inability of the person we contracted with to do the job” or “Turns out he was lying about things, so we’re not going to pay”.

Somehow, I don’t think their lawyers are even worse than Cohen. Of course, it’s possible they felt that cancelling the contract because Cohen was full of crap would cause Cohen to complain to Trump, which would result in the President retaliating.

Fair to point out one meeting is sufficient, or the every popular “corporate speaking engagement” for big $. Terminology wise maybe we should come up with different terms. Yes Cohen and others are lawyers, but what they are doing here isn’t “lawyering” as such, mostly lobbying to use the more polite term for grifting.Report

That’s a false equivalency in about a zillion ways, but let’s start with the obvious: Can you think of a situation in which a paid corporate speaker was hired for a one-year gig, gave one speech, was told not to come back, but got paid for the full year anyways?

Moving on down, let’s start with market pricing. Now, I looked up corporate speaking gigs — what former politicians (or aspiring ones) are making is pretty much in line with what non-politicians with similar profiles make. Maybe there’s some outlier you’re thinking, of by it seems to scale up pretty much the same as the celebrity tiers do.

Now what’s Michael Cohen, really bad lawyer, doing batting so very, very, far from his price range? Most Cooley law grads aren’t getting million dollar deals for “advice” and “insight” after all.Report

I think Cohen is dirty as all get out, so not sure what your getting at, I’ve been pretty clear in my distaste for him and Trump. Cohen was at that level “above his price range” as you put it, because of his association with Trump, no other reason. Thus my previous statement, he isn’t really a “lawyer” in the common usage of the term, he really is a fixer that dabbles in the law and happens to be an attorney to fulfill his role for Trump and others.Report

I’ve long maintained that the speaking gigs are pretty clearly legal bribery, but they’re nowhere near the same neighborhood as what we’re seeing here. Cohen taking huge sums of money off the record (way more than you’d pay a registered lobbyist) is clearly an attempt at not-legal bribery. The hilarious explanations of what the “consulting” was for are true classics.

The interesting question is where the money went and whether Trump new about it or if Cohen was just in business for himself on this one. IMO, it’s a toss of a coin. Trump attracts hangers on who are opportunistic grifters like him. Sometimes he works with them and sometimes they’re just in his orbit. But my understanding is that Trump generally took a dim view of people leeching off of his activities without kicking something upstairs.Report

You mean it should have been obvious that Cohen wasn’t the world class expert on (checking notes) US accounting standards? So massively gifted that you’d go to his secret, unadvertised company directly?

Are you crazy? Of course you’d do that rather than taking cheaper half-assed measures like hiring a team of certified experts from Deloitte or PwC.Report

I thought everyone knew that you opened shell companies for all the different lines of shady business practices… You don’t mix your pay-out slush fund with your corporate shill slush fund with your foreign agent slush fund…how lazy is that? Trump grade corruption.Report

Not sure if this is typical Billionaire but Trump has a guy (Cohen) to to deal with nuisance lawsuits, that includes hookups which threaten to go public. $140k to settle something like this isn’t a large amount of money by Trump’s standards, the situation isn’t unusual for Trump. Presumably Stormy and the Playboy model are just the two we know about out of dozens or hundreds of others.

And Trump selects these guys for being scumbags, so he can throw them under the bus if things get out of hand. Things with AT&T got out of hand.Report

The lawyer, Peter Gleason, did not respond to requests for comment, but he told the New York Times that he had spoken to Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, in 2013 about accusations that he says two women brought to him about Schneiderman, who resigned this week after the New Yorker reported allegations that he abused multiple women.

In a letter submitted to US District Judge Kimba Wood, who is hearing Cohen’s request related to materials seized from his properties by federal agents on April 9, Gleason sought a court order to seal any documents seized in the raid that relate to communications about the two women.

Three guesses as to whether this has kicked off a firestorm of dippy conspiracy theories on Hashtag Resistance Twitter, and the first two don’t count.Report

From August 2018 through February 2019, AVENATTI defrauded a client (“Victim-1”) by diverting money owed to Victim-1 to AVENATTI’s control and use. After assisting Victim-1 in securing a book contract, AVENATTI allegedly stole a significant portion of Victim-1’s advance on that contract. He did so by, among other things, sending a fraudulent and unauthorized letter purporting to contain Victim-1’s signature to Victim-1’s literary agent, which instructed the agent to send payments not to Victim-1 but to a bank account controlled by AVENATTI. As alleged, Victim-1 had not signed or authorized the letter, and did not even know of its existence.

Specifically, prior to Victim-1’s literary agent wiring the second of four installment payments due to Victim-1 as part of the book advance, AVENATTI sent a letter to Victim-1’s literary agent purportedly signed by Victim-1 that instructed the literary agent to send all future payments to a client trust account in Victim-1’s name and controlled by AVENATTI. The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance. When Victim-1 began inquiring of AVENATTI as to why Victim-1 had not received the second installment, AVENATTI lied to Victim-1, telling Victim-1 that he was still attempting to obtain the payment from Victim-1’s publisher. Approximately one month after diverting the payment, AVENATTI used funds recently received from another source to pay $148,750 to Victim-1, so that Victim-1 would not realize that AVENATTI had previously taken and used Victim-1’s money.

Approximately one week later, pursuant to AVENATTI’s earlier fraudulent instructions, the literary agent sent another payment of $148,750 of Victim-1’s book advance to the client account controlled by AVENATTI. AVENATTI promptly began spending the money for his own purposes, including to make payments to individuals with whom AVENATTI had a personal relationship, to make a monthly lease payment on a luxury automobile, and to pay for airfare, dry cleaning, hotels, restaurants and meals, payroll, and insurance costs. Moreover, to conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to AVENATTI, as Victim-1’s lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that Victim-1 believed was missing, AVENATTI led Victim-1 to believe that Victim-1’s publisher was refusing to make the payment to the literary agent, when, as AVENATTI knew, the publisher had made the payment to the literary agent, who had then sent the money to AVENATTI pursuant to AVENATTI’s fraudulent instructions.

Here are my principal conclusions:1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Rep. Justin Amash, a critic of President Trump who entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread after reviewing the full special counsel report.

Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Robert S. Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it. “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The president often says the report found “no collusion, no obstruction,” though neither is true. Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which did interfere in the 2016 election. He did not rule on the obstruction of justice question, saying it was something Congress should determine.

Amash, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, declined on Sunday to rule out a possible 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate.

"Well, I would never rule anything out. That's not on my radar right now," he said of a 2020 bid to Tapper. "But I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting."

Amash told Tapper he believes there is a "wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides" and that "Congress is totally broken."

"I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people -- because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans -- and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time," Amash said.

Question remains, is Justin Amash going to join any Democrat effort to curtail the president, or is he using this as prelude to something else -- such as his own run for the White House? Drama.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Rooting for Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a Game of Thrones fan, and her favorite character is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, who Warren says, “has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.” We learned this in a column Warren wrote for The Cut published Sunday evening.

In the piece, Warren outlines her reasons for her fandom. Daenerys is fair, she fights for the people, and she wants to end slavery. But in talking about Daenerys, Warren can also, subtly, talk about herself. Like the paragraph below, in which she describes the Dragon Queen—or is she describing herself?

“This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical. Skeptical, because they’ve seen another kind of woman on the Iron Throne: the villain we love to hate, Queen Cersei of Casterly Rock.”

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If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'ld jump the life to come. But [...]